Author: Herman Melville
Herman Melville was born in 1819 in New York, son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried to work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, as an elementary school-teacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific, Deserting ship the following year in the Marquises, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a rural estate near Pittsfield, Massachusetts and was hard at work on his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. But literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned away from prose, publishing only poetry in small, privately subsidized editions. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866 to 1885 he was deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died.
